Twitter has announced that they plan to continue appealing a court order to turn over a user's tweets to the authorities. This comes after a ruling last month from a New York criminal judge that Twitter should turn over a slew of tweets from Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protestor, since the tweets were once public. According to a court document, Twitter is taking their appeal to the Appellate Term of the Supreme Court for the First Judicial Department of New York.

Russian authorities have ordered Internet provider Netis Telekom to shut off access to various blogs, including popular microblogging platform Livejournal. The Russian authorities found a neo-nazi blog on the website, and ordered the "the filtration of the specific blog," which led to the shutting down of the IP address that happens to be the portal to the entire Livejournal site.

The French entertainment industry is claiming that web search companies are aiding online piracy. To combat this, they are trying to require Google "to censor search terms for words like 'Torrent,' 'RapidShare,' and 'Megaupload.'" France's Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the entertainment industry, however, Google plans to take this to the Appeals Court.

Web security specialists Blue Coat Software have just unveiled a software that "allows companies to restrict what employees can do on their cellphones while logged into the corporate Wi-Fi." Blue Coat created this software to handle potential security breaches with employees' phones. This new development is meant to allay companies' fears of employees leaking documents or sending confidential data over insecure networks.

Russia's upper house of parliament passed a controversial law that would give the government more control over the country's Internet. Though the Russian government claims the law is meant to "shut down any website that it deems harmful to children," some fear the slippery slope of allowing the government to shut down any website it sees as dangerous. Many groups have protested the legislation, including the Russian language Wikipedia and the country's Yandex search engine.

China has released new guidelines designed to help protect public and private entities from cyber threats. With China being a popular target for cyber attacks, these guidelines are seen as "a statement of intent" to combat the issue. At the very least, this plan hopes to "reduce the number of unprotected machines which can be co-opted by cyber criminals."

YouTube has announced a new tool for video uploaders that blurs people's faces on their servers. Their hope with this new feature is to encourage more dissidents to use their platform as a means for speaking out. In their post they also gave other tips to protect people's anonymity.

The judge overseeing Kim Dotcom's extradition fight in New Zealand has recused himself from the case. After making public comments that could be construed as sympathetic toward Dotcom, the judge has decided "that the appropriate response is for him to step down from the case."

The Senate Finance Committee is considering taking up legislation that has language directly targeting Russia and its recent move toward Internet censorship. In order to grant normal trade relations with the country, the bill would require an annual report from Russia identifying "any actions Russia has taken to restrict access to U.S. digital goods and services, such as barring access to a U.S. website like YouTube."

Dutch authorities have taken down two secondary servers used by the Grum botnet. These servers, aiding the giant spam-bot, were just detected last week by malware intelligence firm FireEye. While a significant step in fighting online spam problems, the impact of removing these servers is expected to be minimal.